The more controlled the calving season the better for producers when it comes to marketing calves, team members shared on a recent BCI Cattle Chat podcast in response to a listener question.
“If you can shorten and have a more uniform calving season, then think about the marketing side,” says Dustin Pendell, K-State associate professor in agricultural economics. “If you’ve got calves that may be similar size, weight, and age, that might be more attractive to a buyer.”
Bob Larson, K-State professor clinical sciences, agrees saying “a uniform calf crop, whether it’s a large calf crop or a small one, is more attractive to buyers.”
Another management tool includes preconditioning those calves.
“Vaccination protocols, dehorning, castration are management decisions that might lead to some various marketing strategies that buyers would buy those calves,” Pendell says.
Develop alliances or sell through a co-op also offers marketing potential.
“If you can pool your calves you have more selling power, potentially,” Pendell explains.
It takes time to build alliances or relationships with other producers, but we do see several small producers selling load lots of cattle together, Larson adds.
“They have to, first of all, the people need to get along well, because you’re going to make some compromises on timing of marketing and things like that. But by having several producers that are relatively small, but by combining them, you get into those semi load, lot size, groups of cattle. There’s some marketing advantage there.”
Niche markets, direct-to-restaurant or direct-to-consumer sales are also options, depending on the time producers want to spend creating them.
Think about to optimizing cull cows vs. retaining or buying heifers, Pendell adds.
“When it becomes more expensive to import cull cows or meat that goes into hamburgers, that relative value of those cull cows are going up right now relative to heifers,” Pendell says. “Does it make sense to maybe keep a cull cow around a little longer versus bring in a heifer? You have to think through some of those kinds of things.”
Jason Warner, KSU extension cow-calf specialist, suggests producers work with their seedstock provider.
“For some of those providers, there are opportunities where they provide some marketing outlets for calves that are sired by those genetics those producers are selling,” Warner says.
Another consideration for small producers with less than 100 cows is to evaluate the bull costs relative to the number of females.
“If bulls are selling for $6, 7, 8,000 a head, and if we only use that bull in one breeding season or two breeding seasons, and the number of females that bull actually services is pretty small, then our cost per pregnant female goes up,” Warner says. “I think there’s opportunities to look at the true cost of artificial insemination relative to bull ownership with a fewer number of females or potentially leasing bulls in some of those situations. How we figure out how we get those pregnancies in those small herds is important too.”
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